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For LD27 I had a few ideas, the first I had was that of an FPS where you have 10 seconds to escape an exploding building. I decided against this as I generally make physics-based games.

The idea I decided to go with was ChronoCards, a 10 second card game. I originally planned to have a CCG kinda meta-game, but didn’t really implement it.

Anyway, let’s have a look at how it went:

The Good

Component-based data-driven gameplay: All the cards were implemented through .card files that are loaded at runtime, which specify the text and pictures on the card, as well as which “attributes” a card has, which is basically an effect, trigger and an argument. Although this means I still have to code each attribute, it makes it much easier to modify without recompiling.

Robust, flexible codebase: No time was spent on the underlying framework. Graphics components worked flawlessly and adding audio was as easy as:

ASID Intro = Audio.LoadSound(“Intro.ogg”);
Audio.Play(Intro);

The Bad

Indecision: I was still deciding ideas 6 hours into the competition and was frequently second-guessing my decisions when it would have been twice as quick to do it the wrong way and recode it.

Time management / procrastination: I felt myself being easily distracted and putting things off. Overall I estimate I probably did less than 10 hours of actual coding, spread over the 48 hour period. I left a lot of it to the last hour or so (I submitted less than a minute before the compo ended) and as such had a lot of stuff unimplemented (a deck building system, with a card shop using money gained from winning).

Game idea: I think 10 seconds is just too short for there to be any appreciable strategy. It may work with 30 seconds or a minute though, and at some point I may revisit the idea.

The Ugly

Unresizable GUI: Even though my GUI system allows for it (see the buttons on the menu), the battle scene has entirely static GUI element positioning. The hand does not move down to the bottom of the screen, meaning if you have a larger screen it looks really silly.

No animations: Though maybe justified by the time-based mechanics of the game, I feel even a 1 or 2 frame animation would have improved the look of the card drawing and placing.

I fell asleep whilst extracting the framework from my most recent project, then woke up 30 minutes after the competition started, thanks brain!

I should ideally have done this days ago but I had a rather important stuff going on, but I guess there’s no rule against doing this after the competition starts, as long as it is before you start work on the game.

Anyway, 30 mins of wrangling the code I now have the framework. As per the rule “Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry” here is my code:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4826080/LD.zip

Hopefully starting a hour into the competition won’t somehow ruin my game 😀